The Squirrel Mountain Valley plate. Relief from Copernicus GLO-30; rivers and lakes from USGS NHD; watersheds from the USGS Watershed Boundary Dataset; roads and city limits from Census TIGER 2024.
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Chance of showers; cooler
Sunny
Showers likely
Showers likely
Mostly sunny
84° on Nov. 13, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1951. Next is 82° in 1990.
Squirrel Mountain Valley’s center stands about 3,020 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,540 ft to 5,490 ft, a difference of 2,950 ft: mountain country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Piute Peak, about 8,400 ft, 12 miles south.
The section below crosses 5 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 4×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Granodiorite. Age: Permian to Tertiary, 2.6 to 260 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Schist, gneiss. Age: Paleoproterozoic to Cretaceous, 66 to 2,500 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Diorite, gabbro. Age: Triassic to Cretaceous, 66 to 252 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.9 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale.
Heights from Copernicus GLO-90 (a surface model: it includes buildings and tree canopy); summits from USGS GNIS; rivers from USGS NHDPlus HR; rock from the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation.
A raindrop that lands in Squirrel Mountain Valley reaches the Tulare Lake basin by way of Isabella Lake and the Kern: about 80 river miles. The Tulare Lake basin has no outlet to the sea: the water leaves only by evaporating or soaking into the ground.
Lake on the way: Isabella Lake.
A lake that comes back. The bed of Tulare Lake is farmland now; in very wet years it floods again.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Squirrel Mountain Valley; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Squirrel Mountain Valley has a warm-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 89° in July; winter nights fall to about 27° in December. A normal year brings about 6 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 19 inches of water.
On November 14 Squirrel Mountain Valley normally reaches 63° and falls to 32°. The record high is 83°, in 1999; the record low 16°, in 1985. The most rain on this date, 1.48 in, fell in 1952.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1951 at Glennville, 18 miles west-northwest, 120 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
